Technical Field
This invention relates generally to the field of online auctions. More specifically, this invention relates to online auctions for electronic advertising where bidders compete for advertisement impressions to be presented to viewers of electronic media.
Description of the Related Art
In the Real-Time Bidding (RTB) environment for electronic media impression auctions, an electronic advertising agency/consolidator operating a demand-side platform receives billions of daily auction opportunities for electronic media impressions from partners such as Google of Mountain View, Calif. (“Google®”), Yahoo! by Yahoo! Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. (“Yahoo!®”), etc. These partners operate auctions for advertising (“ad”) impressions and then place electronic ads based on auction results. A partner's auction is considered an external auction with respect to a demand-side platform where an internal auction is also operated to determine which advertisements, also referred to herein as ads, and bids are submitted to the external auction. Each ad impression opportunity includes information parameters about the ad impression, for example but not limited to, the target website, geolocation of the user, ad size, user cookie, etc., that are used for targeting purposes. The demand side platform then processes hundreds of ads in their system, supplied by advertiser clients along with desired filtering parameters, against information parameters supplied by the partner, and filters out any ads that do not qualify, e.g. the ad does not want to target a particular site, such as youtube.com by YouTube, LLC of San Bruno, Calif. For ads that are not removed due to a mismatch with targeting parameters, the demand-side platform then evaluates the corresponding bids that represent how much each client advertiser is willing to pay. Because the demand-side platform can only send one ad/bid back to the partner offering the impression opportunity, an internal auction of all qualified/targetable ads within the demand-side platform is performed and then one ad/bid is selected to send back to the partner. Typically this is the ad with the highest value bid. An ad/bid winning an internal auction at the demand-side platform and being submitted to an external auction at the partner is not guaranteed of being placed. Such ad must also win the external auction. This entire process occurs in real-time and the demand side platform may only have milliseconds, for example, available to respond to an impression opportunity offered by a partner.